What charming women of the provinces have since
developed into a Eugenie Grandet, a Madame de Mortsauf, a Madame
Claes! . . . What was wanting to Balzac in the hell of life, whose
every spiral he descended, was virginity in love and ingenuousness in
poetry. He always lost himself in the difficult places of style; and
himself wept over the lack. When he wrote the _Search for the
Absolute_, he was in quest of the ideal; but the ideal is that which
one had inside one's self, just as love is. The studies of the chemist
and alchemist, of the doctor and jurist, do not light the flame of
Prometheus."
The quotations do not exhaust the list of portraits emanating from
Balzac's fellows, but they adequately illustrate the varying views,
which were many. Indeed, like the sculptor who produces several
studies of the same model and shows a different interpretation each
time, critics have presented us, in more than one instance, with
descriptions of the novelist, at an earlier and a later date, that
contain important discrepancies.
Balzac was an enigma because he was not always the same personality to
himself. Both his energies and his desires carried him outside the
limits in which a man's individuality is usually manifested.
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